Dear Member of the High-Tech Audio Industry:
Please.
Stop thinking about performance and features for a second: focus on "does it work or does it crash?"
If you are under the impression that your testing staff is doing a good job of addressing this problem, then
--you are very likely living in blissful ignorance, or
--you are in an industry other than hardware and software for music on computers.
Blaming Microsoft does no good to your customer who is trying to beat a deadline. Blaming other companies is only harmful to the industry.
If you are selling something to me, you _MUST_ be able to clearly state the conditions under which it is known to work and not work. Too many people are satisfied if their product is compatible with 70% of the systems out there. (That's a quote from one of your companies). If it works on 70% of systems, you are _robbing_ 30% of your customers.
Hmmmmm.
I think some examples of stupidly untested high-tech audio devices would make for entertaining reading, don't you?
Categories
Audio
Comments (3)
Read More Entries by The Fat Man.
geez, there's so many examples, where to begin?
1. Peak Pro 5 on OSX tiger: every now and then, i'll be working on a sound using Peak's own plugins (like Freq or Impulse verb) and once i get it right, i'll Bounce the effect ... which totally destroys the sound, static, noise, garbled, what the hell?
2. i installed SampleTank2SE that came bundled with my new Digi002, running on a 1.3Ghz G4 powerbook ... everytime i load an instrument, i get an "out of CPU" error - but checking the CPU load meter shows that i'm only using 15% and it BLIPS to redline on load. but after clearing the error dialog, everything runs just fine ... bugs like that kinda sap my motivation to use the software or upgrade to the full version, ya know what i mean?
3. oh, and my all time favorite: i usually have a little drum machine sitting next to the piano for use as a metronome and practice aid (to keep my time honest) and my ancient roland TR-something_or_other finally gave up the ghost, and since i only wanted click plus a coupla simple beats, i picked up an Alesis SR-16 for cheap. i did a solo piano recording session using the click on headphones, all well and good BUT later, when i wanted to add some other tracks to the piano for a ringtone (hey, that's what the pay me for), i dropped the piano take into DP and set the tempo (which i knew was 120bpm, because i played to click, right?) ... and holy crap, what's going on? can't get the piano to line up right ... and on further investigation, it turns out (wait for it) -- the Alesis' 120bpm **IS**NOT**EXACTLY** 120bpm, it's something like 119.5978 -- and so none of the piano tracks will EVER line up exactly in the sequencer ... ya think somebody might've checked to see if the TIME of a DRUM MACHINE was correct!?!
I reviewed a couple of pitch-to-MIDI converters for Keyboard magazine in late 1988. After the issue came out, I received an excited call from a friendly fellow who claimed his pitch-to-MIDI converter could distinguish individual notes played in a chord on piano. Dubiously, I asked him to send me his product for evaluation. A rackmount device with a plastic microphone arrived about a week later. It actually looked like a mass-produced unit. Upon connecting it to some MIDI modules and trying it with both the included mic and some pro mics such as a Shure SM58, what I discovered was that this mysterious box was actually a profound stochastic note generator. Even if I sang the most boring, unwaivering pitch into a mic, the attached MIDI synths would generate a wild series of unrelated notes throughout the audible frequency range. Had this been manufactured by a major, reputable company, a scathing review would surely have followed. But this guy was someone out of the blue whom I never heard from again. I carefully repackaged and returned the product with a note saying, "Thank you for sharing. You should be very happy that we don't publish a review of it."
One of my favorites was a home keyboard with a grossly underpowered CPU. Check out what happened when I hooked a MIDI knob box to it and twisted a knob while the demo song was playing:
Way Over the Rainbow (932KB MP3)